“A day is coming, when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whisky, or any other of the necessaries of life.” —Mark Twain” Inventors, programmers, writers, and musicians often get the same advice for
Spanner in the works
The developers of Google’s Spanner database built an interesting system but chose to build their own clock synchronization technology instead of getting a more precise off the shelf solution and chose to make extensive use of the notoriously complex Paxos
Clock Sync in Finance and Beyond.
A FSMLabs whitepaper. [gview file=”https://www.yodaiken.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/financeandbeyond.pdf”]
James Damore’s defenders (updated)
(recently saw a post claiming that Damore’s firing was an indication of closed minds at Google, so it seemed important to repost this – vy) The Google manifesto is a crackpot political argument combined with basic scientific ignorance, not a scientific
Google Manifesto shows that many programmers are bad at logic
Everyone can recognize some kinds of spurious reasoning – like the following: (A) Most programmers are not great. (B) Google tries to hire only excellent programmers (C) A implies B is hopeless and counterproductive and demoralizing Clearly, step (C) is
Current reading: July 8 2017
Principal type-schemes for functional programs∗ Luis Damas† and Robin Milner First published in POPL ’82: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, ACM, pp. 207–212 THE PRINCIPAL TYPE-SCHEME OF AN OBJECT IN COMBINATORY LOGIC BY
The replicated state machine method of fault tolerance from 1980s
The first time I saw this method was when I went to work for Parallel Computer Systems, , later called Auragen, in the famous tech startup center of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. I commuted there from the East Village. (True story: I
Cutting and pasting about Kodak’s demise
This graph from Peter Diamandis about how Kodak entered the sinkhole is kind of amazing. Diamandis explains Kodak’s failure to swerve in what is I think the orthodox Silicon Valley analysis: [in 1996] Kodak had a $28 billion market cap and
The Auragen file system.
This article on the interesting Wave Transactional File System inspired me to look up an earlier file system that also used copy on write semantics. From: Anita Borg, Wolfgang Blau, Wolfgang Graetsch, Ferdinand Herrmann, and Wolfgang Oberle. 1989. Fault tolerance
MiFID II, GPS and UTC time
I have a post up on FSMLabs web site about the use of GPS and other satellite time for MiFID II timestamp compliance. It’s fascinating how much effort has recently gone into trying to convince people that MiFID II will